It's late and I'm tired. Just hauled a suitcase up six flights of stairs to my friend's apartment in Manhattan where I'm going to stay the night. Tomorrow I'm going to a yoga class, picking up a bunch of Icarus books at Fountain House, and then getting on a plane to England!

It's been so nice to see everyone's responses to the last blog post and forum post I put up, the one about gender and sex. It's funny -- I'm realizing now that part of why my art and my writing dried up for a while is because some part of me was trying very hard not to feel, and if I was not feeling, then there could be no honest bubbling up in the way that spills into art and words. And so there wasn't. I think that after my mom died and my partner left I just had to keep busy for a while and do things that seemed simpler and more solid, like meditate and read and work. Opening up to my art meant opening up to my whole self and all the terrifying gorgeous potentially heartbreaking possibilities there, and I just didn't feel safe going there for a while. But it seems that opening my heart up in little bits is not actually killing me -- in fact, I feel a lot less likely to kill myself now that I am letting the feelings come out rather than trying not to have them. This time last year I was so full of rage and terror and confusion that I did not want to feel or act out, so instead I would find myself doing something very simple -- like trying to sit through a house meeting -- and suddenly my mind would get overtaken by these visions of smashing a 2 by 4 into my head or smashing my skull against the floor. Right there in the middle of the farm's pink little parlor while everyone discussed things like bulk ordering brown rice. It was horrible. I was sure it was just more evidence that I was irreparably crazy and jumping in front of the Amtrak train down by the river might be the best solution for everyone involved. That sounds so insane now! That that could ever have seemed reasonable. But I was at the end of one of the worse bottoms of my life, the last 2 weeks before i finally got sober, and all the old demons in my head were having a party. or a sacrifice. or something. It is amazing to realize that things really do change. Especially if you are willing to surrender.

anyway. my intention in this blog post had been to point you all towards 2 amazing resources that friends of mine have started in NYC, but now I'm all exhausted, and I wanted to give them a properly respectful treatment. For now, I'll post the links. At some point later on I'll write more about them.

The first is The Interdependence Project: http://theidproject.com

From their website: "Located in New York City's East Village, The Interdependence Project is a grassroots, community-oriented dharma project. Through weekly meditation gatherings and Buddhist studies classes, day-long retreats, as well as art shows, community service and political activism, The ID Project is dedicated to applying the insight of meditation and the truth of interdependence to life in a 21st-century urban environment."

 

The second is the Rock Dove Collective. http://www.rockdovecollective.org/

From their website: "Rock Dove is a collective of anarchist individuals who seek to address the need for helpful, accessible, non-hierarchical health assistance in our communities. We support de-centralized and non-oppressive forms and sources of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well-being. We see this as both a daily necessity and a revolutionary strategy."

good night Icaristas!

 

oh and hey -- check out this amazing artist named Bird who I found on the internet today when I was researching mandalas. You can visit his artwork here:http://www.angelfire.com/nd2/bird/

g'night!